Returns true iff name1 is a common abbreviation of name2 in English. For example, 'Dave' is a common abbreviation of 'David'. The list of abbreviations used includes a number of old abbreviations such as 'Davy' for 'David'.

Like parseName, but a) returns the normalized form of the name instead of an array, and b) does additional cleaning-up. To be prefered to parseName in most cases and by default if processing variable or dubious data.

Takes a name in one of the multiple formats that one can write a name in, and returns it as an array representing the post-comma and pre-comma parts of its normalized form (in that order). For example, parseName("David Bourget") returns ('David','Bourget').

Takes a string of names as parameter and returns an array of normalized representations of the names in the string. This routine understands a wide variety of formattings for names and lists of names typically found as list of authors in bibliographic citations. See the test 03-parseNames.t for multiple examples.

Returns a true value iff name1 and name2 could reasonably be two writings of the same name. For example, 'D J Bourget' could reasonably be a writing of 'David Joseph Bourget'. So could 'D Bourget'. But 'D F Bourget' is not a reasonable writing of 'David Joseph Bourget'. The value returned is a (potentially new) name string which combines the most complete tokens of the two submitted name strings.

Contrary to what one might expect, this subroutine does not use weakenings() behind the scenes. Another way to check for name compatibility would be to check that two names have a weakening in common (probably too permissive for most purposes) or that one name is a weakening of the other.

Sets the abbreviation mapping used to determine whether, say, 'David' and 'Dave' are compatible name parts. The mapping is also used by abbreviationOf(). The format of the array should be: 'Dave', 'David', 'Davy', 'David', etc, otherwise representable in Perl as 'Dave' => 'David', 'Davy' => 'David', etc.

Returns an array of normalized names which are weakenings of the first and last name passed as argument. Substituting a given names by an initial, or removing an initial, for example, are operations which generate weakenings of a name. Such operations are applied with arbitrary depth, until the name has been reduced to a single initial followed by the lastname, and all intermediary steps returned.

You can use weakenings(parseName("Lastname, Firstname")) to weaken a first and last name as a single string.

Returns 'F' if someone with the provided firstname is likely female, 'M' if likely male, and undef otherwise. A frequency threshold (default = 0) can be specified so that a gender is returned only if the name is found with at least this frequency among people with this gender (according to the US census). A threshold of 0.1 (which means 0.1%) ensures very reliable results (precision above 99%) with a recall of about 60%. When the threshold is lower, this function has a tendency to overestimate the number of females.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.10.1 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.